Archive

Quotes

The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.

—Tacitus, c. 117

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

—Thomas Jefferson, 1787

No human life, not even the life of a hermit, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.

—Hannah Arendt, 1958

What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1830

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure it is right.

—Judge Learned Hand, 1944

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

—Dean Acheson, 1970

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

—H.L. Mencken, 1921

You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

—Henrik Ibsen, 1882

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

—Jeremy Bentham, c. 1832

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

—Mario Cuomo, 1985

People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.

—Robert Byrd, 2005

I say violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie.

—H. Rap Brown, 1967

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged.

—John Wilkes Booth, 1865